Saturday, 22 April 2017

A Millennium Later

If we ask what happens in the twentieth century of Poul Anderson's Technic History timeline, then the answer is that we already know because that timeline does not diverge from ours until some time in the twenty first century whereas, if we ask what will happen a thousand years after the events of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, then the answer is that we cannot know because Larsson did not write a sequel set that far in the future and indeed would not have done so because he was not writing that kind of fiction.

On the other hand, Millennium, like any contemporary fiction, is set in a timeline that is identical with ours except for the existence of the characters and the occurence of the events that are described in the Trilogy. Thus, whatever is going to happen in the Millennium timeline is what is going to happen in our timeline. We do not know what that is but we need not envisage a different future for Millennium as I was doing when I began to write this post. This is a consequence of the genre. Although I am intrigued by ways of fitting different genres into a single fictional tapestry, there is no need to project a science fictional future for Millennium.

9 comments:

I think the ONLY dated story in Anderson's Technic Civilization series is "The Saturn Game," which begins with a quote from a scholarly paper pub. by a university on the Moon in the year AD 2057. So, unless we get cracking and start colonizing the Moon VERY soon, the Technic series will diverge from our timeline by then!

I never write in the contemporary timeline, strictly speaking. There are always clues that it's not -quite- our 1998, or whenever. Some think of this as a clever literary conceit. Others as CYA... 8-).

Ha, ha!!! Either is fine with me! For instance, the clue you put in CONQUISTADOR was having a ROLFE family, when in fact the male line of that family had died out in our timeline. I did wonder if the Earth/2 of your book DRAKON was set in OUR Earth.

Paul and Sean:"CYA" is actually pre-cyber; there's an entry for it, listed as "Relatively Modern," in *A Dictionary of Soldier Talk* published in 1984.

On a tangent, "LOL" has been tainted for me by a fellow who commented on a number of news articles I read years ago. His idea of reasoned debate was to restate his opponents' views into an exaggerated or otherwise distorted "sound bite" ... and then dismissively "respond" with nothing more than "LOL! LOL!" I found it so annoying that even if I'd agreed with his basic position on whatever topic, his "LOL! LOL!" would've prejudiced me against him.

Sean:Well, I didn't say that "CYA" necessarily ORIGINATED in the military, only that it was used there in '84, which is, I think, before we truly had something that could be called an Internet and "cyber culture."